Sometimes Your Clients Don't WANT to Hear You

Have you ever talked to one of your clients and even though they have bought your wares and love you to death, you notice that they are not listening to what you have to say about how to use the product they just bought to their advantage?

You spent the whole discovery time finding the hidden truth about what problem they are ultimately solving with your product. They believe it will do what they want it to do...but only if they get to use it the way THEY want, not the way WE want them to.

In many ways it is like Ernie telling Bert he can't hear him because he has a banana in his ear. It would be easy to take it out and listen to Bert, but Ernie wants to do things his way.

I worked for a sales consulting company whose assessment products are meant to tell an employer if someone will be successful in sales. It is a great tool, however not all the clients used it properly or chose to believe the results. Many times they hired someone who the assessment told them not to hire, but they liked anyways. That person failed more often than not. If they had done what I told them to do or used the product properly they would have saved a lot of time and money, which is what I was trying to do in the first place!

What do you do when the client won't listen to you? Sometimes you just have to give up and let them try it their way. As a rule of thumb if I have a client tell me they are going to use my product in the wrong manner and it will ruin their results, there are two things I do:

1. I explain three times (in different ways and at different points of the conversation) and get them to acknowledge that they are using the product wrong and they know it. As a radio client of mine once said when I told him the ad copy wasn't calling for any action on behalf of the listener, "I have 22 years of experience doing it this way that is why. What do you know?!"

2. After hearing that three times I propose a measured test and get them to agree to a second package or use half of the package in the manner I want them to. A local camera store bought a month radio ads from me and wanted to increase the amount of film (yes this was a few years ago) their photo lab was processing. We did a great commercial and they ran ads scattered across the day at different times. This store was downtown and said that most of their traffic came in at lunch time as office workers took their break. They ran their schedule for two weeks with no results.  I had them run the remaining two weeks concentrating their ads on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays during the hours of 6am-9am and 11am-1pm to catch people after a weekend (when they most likely took pictures of something) on their way to work and during their lunch hours. Running commercials in those time slots were twice as much as those previously run, however they reached more people and were concentrated so they heard them more often. Lab business was up 20% by the end of the second week. They signed a long term agreement after that.

In this case I had to let the camera shop owner do things his way, however if I hadn't secured an agreement to try tings the way I knew they would work, he probably would have never renewed thinking that the ads didn't work and I was another idiot salesman.

You have to try to get the banana out of a client's ear. If they refuse, have another piece of fruit ready that you can at least substitute for the banana.

Thanks for reading!

Ev

"A Heck of A Nice Guy"